For a while now author has tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free and open standard according to included definition. Here is a short writeup of what he has been able to gather so far. He brought up the topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list in July 2009, for those that want to see some background information.

Microsoft and Apple continue their attack on freedom facilitation in the World Wide Web and Apple's PR problem escalates

"All video codecs are covered by patents," Jobs said in the e-mail, according to Roy. "A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other 'open source' codecs now

We've all heard how the h.264 is rolled over on patents and royalties. Even with these facts, I kept supporting the best-performing "delivery" codec in the market, which is h.264. "Let the best win", I kept thinking. But it wasn't until very recently when I was made aware that the problem is way deeper. No, my friends.

A Mozilla developer has modified the Theora codec for greater efficiency with Texas Instruments' OMAP 3, a processor used in smartphones such as the Motorola Droid, Nokia N900 and Palm Pre

Grant goes toward development of ARM-optimized video codec

Ask most computer users what their preferred video codec is and they'll look at you as if you asked what sort of motor they'd prefer in their washing machine. ``We just want it to work!'' they say. In this regard, it’s exactly the same for content creators and publishers. Every visitor to a website that can't view a video is one set of eyeballs less for a message to get through to.

Less than a year after the release of Theora 1.0, the wonderful people at Xiph have released Theora 1.1. The 1.1 release is a software-only release of the Theora encoder and decoder. It does not include any changes to the Theora format.